A WORD ABOUT BARING POWDER EVERY housekeeper should underEvery housekeeper should under- stand the nature of baking powder. This is important for two reasons: first, to insure palatable food, and, second, to avoid danger to health. A perfect baking powder is one that will produce the most leavening gas in the oven and the least residue in the stomach. It should be understood that baking powder is not a food of itself; its sole object is to make food light and sweet. Since this is true, the more it escapes into the air, after doing its leavening work in the oven, the better. The less residue left to be actually eaten, the bet ter. Baking powders are usu ally made from either cream of tar tar or phosphate. Analysis has shown that the former leaves about seventy per cent of its own weight in Rochelle salts as a residue, and that phosphate leaves about thirty-five per cent of its own weight in phosphatic salts. Ro chelle salts are the basic element of a Seidlitz powder. We have it upon no less an authority than the U. S. Department of Agriculture at Wash ington, D. C., that " A loaf of bread made from quart of flour leavened with cream of tartar baking powder contains forty-five grains more of Rochelle salts than is contained in one Seidlitz powder." (See Bulletin No. 13.) Dr. A. Warner Shepard, formerly Health Officer in Brooklyn, said: " I have not the slightest doubt that the mental and physical health of thou sands is permanently injured by the excessive use of Rochelle salts in im pure beer, bread, and other forms of food and drink. It is certainly a factor in the alarming increase of Bright's disease of the kidneys and similar complaints. It irritates tbe kidneys, bowels, and stomach, and may therefore produce most unfor tunate results." Dr. Moreau Morris, of the New York Board of Health, says: " It may be that I am a little prejudiced, but I think I express the consensus of the medical profession when I say that Rochelle salts should never be used by a person except by a physician's advice. Its continued use induces a very unhealthy condition of the stomach, and especially of the bowels, and finally produces constipation of an aggravated type." Unfortunately, a great deal of mis information has been disseminated by interested manufacturers, and it is said upon good authority that $500, 000 are now being spent every year to advertise the " pure " qualities of cream of tartar.
As a matter of fact, much of the cream of tartar used in the manu facture of baking powder is made from the dregs of wine vats, and the residue left after the chemical action in the processes of baking takes place is unhealthful. Phosphate not
only leaves less residue after baking than cream of tartar (about one half as much), but phosphatic salts are comparatively harmless.
Baking powder may be pure in the can and unwholesome in the bread. A reaction takes place in the process of baking, so that the substance left in the bread is entirely different from the material that entered the can, be cause of chemical processes in the baking. The statement that a powder contains this or that substance may be misleading, for the reason that the consumer wants to know what goes into his stomach, and not what goes into the can.
Brands of baking powder put up with the private firm name of a local merchant are usually found to be of inferior quality at least. The local dealer's name is generally injured by this custom, since his own reputation, not that of the manufacturer, goes behind the powder, and the merchant is usually not competent to judge the quality of the product.
Then there are the prize-package baking powders. If sold at t,en cents a pound, or if " twenty-five cents pays for twenty-five ounces," they will be found to be inferior, as the ingre dients would cost as much (or more) at wholesale, even when bought in very large quantities.
There are, in other words, two ex tremes that should be avoided by the careful housewife: on the one hand, the so-called Trust-made goods, sold at double prices in order to pay the Trust dividends of some $10,000,000 a year on a sale of something like 10,000,000 pounds a year; and, on the other hand, the cheap prize package powders just mentioned. The fact is that baking-powder ingredients of first quality may be purchased in the open market by anyone at, say, nineteen cents a pound, to make as good a baking powder as anybody manufactures (if one only knew how to mix them), and, of course, a large manufacturer ought to be able to buy them cheaper. A first-class powder may be sold at a fair profit for about twenty-five cents a pound. It has been estimated that it costs one company something like thirty cents a pound to p;,y divi dends ,on many millions of watered stock and to sustain its business pol icy before beginning to manufacture its powder. Obviously, the public must pay these huge bills, and this fact would of itself account for the fifty-cents-a-pound price.